


on a clear day

by sofia_estrella



Category: Breaking Bad, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 12:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sofia_estrella/pseuds/sofia_estrella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt and Jesse venture out farther than usual to cook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on a clear day

“Are you sure you know how to get back?” Walt sits in the passenger seat, glancing skeptically at Jesse as he drives the RV down what could loosely be described as a road.

“Give me some credit, yo, my sense of direction is like — really good.” 

Walt rolls his eyes and turns to face forward. This is the farthest out they’ve ever gone. And yeah, it was his idea to find a new place to cook, well outside their typical radius, but his internal compass got mixed up a few turns ago. He checks his cellphone: no signal, of course. There never is. 

The RV dips violently into a rut. Jesse swears and grips the wheel tighter.

“How’s this look?” he asks, slowing the RV. 

Walt peers out the window. It’s flat all around. He can see for miles, probably. The sky is clear and cloudless. There’s what looks like a fence in the distance, but nothing else beside shrubs and grasses in sight. 

“This’ll work.” 

Jesse brings the RV to a bumpy stop. He takes the keys out of the ignition.

“Now, let’s talk through where we’re gonna leave the keys this time…” Walt’s voice is pure condescension. 

Jesse slips them into his pocket, mutters “asshole” as he turns away to prepare the RV. 

They cook. It’s not like last time; there’s no false pretense of a barrel of methylamine to get through. They only plan to be out for the day. One batch. They still have a backlog of product they haven’t been able to move, but cooking is something of a habit. 

So when the daylight streaming in through the windows darkens, Walt pauses, confused. “What time is it?” He reaches for his cell phone. It’s only a little after three. “Why’d it get so dark?”

“I dunno. Clouds?” Jesse doesn’t seem at all interested.

But when the dim light in the RV turns faintly blue, they look at each other, eyebrows furrowed behind their respirators.

“What the fuck…” Jesse leans over the ‘work station’ to peer out the window. He can’t see much, but he watches as the light outside turns from blue to purple then red. He rips off the respirator, ignoring Walt as he warns him (“Jesse, there are toxic fumes in here, you should really — ”) and rubs his eyes. The light mutates from red to orange.

“Yo — do you see this?” He’s about the turn from the window to the door when there’s suddenly a loud, clanging _thud_ on the roof of the RV. Walt and Jesse look up nervously. Walt lifts his respirator too, as if that would help him hear better.

“What the — ”

“Shh.” Walt holds up a hand to silence his partner. There are a couple more thuds; loud, reverberating sounds above them and more muffled ones from all around. “Is it hail?” Walt mutters, tilting his head as he listens. 

“Way too big to be hail,” Jesse says with a nervous laugh. He reaches toward the door. “I’m gonna take a peek.”

Walt lets him, but stays put.

Jesse opens the door cautiously. The glow that floods in through the door is a bright green now. Walt tries to think of a reason for the sky turning such unnatural hues: _don’t tornados do that sometimes? before a tornado, anyways?_

“Oh, man. You gotta see this,” Jesse says, stepping outside.

“Jesse!” Walt rushes after him, out the door. He finds Jesse standing still, staring up. Walt follows his gaze, and the yellow light as it grows more intense, up to a towering cumulonimbus cloud. It looks low, lower than clouds should be. It’s flashing ominously, bolts of lightning shooting from one part of the cloud to another. There’s a buzzing feeling of static electricity in the air, and a low whistling noise. Walt thought he could feel the air pressure changing just within the few minutes that he stood there. The cloud blocks out the sun, but gives off its own yellow glow. The yellow turns to orange as they stand there, transfixed. 

Then there’s a dull thud at their feet that breaks them out of their trance. Jesse jumps away from whatever hit the ground, his hand grabbing at Walt’s arm as he yelps.

Walt looks down to see a dead armadillo, its shell split from the impact, but probably dead before it hit the ground. Then he widens his gaze to sweep the ground: there are dead animals everywhere. Lizards, frogs, birds — all small and stiff, scattered as far as he can see.

“This is some weird shit going on,” Jesse mumbles, startling at the sound of a dead crow hitting the top of the RV. 

Walt nods absently, cupping his hands around his eyes as he looks up at the cloud.

“Let’s get out of here.” Jesse fiddles with the door of the RV. “Mr. White. Let’s go.”

Walt nods again, scratching his goatee. They go back into the RV to an unfinished and most likely now ruined batch. They dump it alongside the dead desert fauna outside their door and put on their respirators again. Walt wonders, perhaps, if it was exposure to the fumes that caused some kind of hallucination. He’ll ask Jesse later to describe in detail what he saw 

He knows that tornados sometimes change the sky strange colors and pick up and drop animals. But that was no tornado. He takes the keys from Jesse— he’s jittery, his hands are shaking a little — and starts the RV. 

“Do you remember the way back?” Walt asks.

“Oh. Yeah. Um, that way.” Jesse points off vaguely to their left. 

There’s no way to avoid bumping over the carcasses and Jesse winces every time. Eventually the light coming from behind them brightens and returns to the neutral tint of daylight. Walt can still see the hulking cloud in the rearview mirror, but it gets smaller and smaller with every passing minute.

Jesse relaxes, drumming on the dashboard, and making Darth Vader noises through his respirator. Suddenly he stops goofing around, eyes wide behind the mask. “We left the animals on the roof.”

Walt sighs. “I’ll stop. You can climb up and throw them down. 

“Whoa, why don’t you do it?”

“I’m not going to argue about this, Jesse — ”

“Just, like, take a few sudden turns. Throw ‘em off. 

Walt looks over at Jesse, his mouth slightly open. “Throw them off?”

“I don’t know, just… start and stop really fast. The momentum will — ”

Walt stops the RV, but not suddenly enough to throw anything off. He unbuckles his seatbelt. Jesse listens to Walt’s footsteps above him, on the roof, and sees a rattlesnake and a jackrabbit fly off the roof and land on the dusty ground. Walt comes back in and they keep going.

“So,” Jesse says, a few miles along. “What was all that about?”

“I have no idea,” Walt says calmly.

Jesse sighs and plays with the radio station, getting mostly static until a voice crackles in:

_ Have any of our listeners seen the glowing cloud that has been moving in from the west? Well, John Peters—you know, the farmer?—he saw it over the western ridge this morning, said he would have thought it was the setting sun if it wasn’t for the time of day. Apparently the cloud glows in a variety of colors, perhaps changing from observer to observer, although all report a low whistling when it draws near. One death has already been attributed to the glow cloud. But listen, it’s probably nothing. If we had to shut down the town for every mysterious event that at least one death could be attributed to, we’d never have time to do anything, right? That’s what the Sheriff’s Secret Police are saying, and I agree. Although, I would not go so far as to endorse their suggestion to run directly at the cloud, shrieking and waving your arms, just to see what it does._

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think that Breaking Bad and Welcome to Night Vale are in the same fictional universe.
> 
> This is my first attempt at Breaking Bad fanfic.


End file.
